Engaging culture

7 Deadly Things About LCD Soundsystem’s new Album ‘American Dream’

James Murphy has been singing about getting older since we met him. “Losing My Edge” and “All My Friends” were about aging, and American Dream is very much about aging – “In the morning everything’s clearer / When the sunlight exposes your age.”

Murphy has said that David Bowie convinced him to re-form the band after they split in 2011. Murphy, who played percussion on Bowie’s final album Blackstar, said: “I spent a good amount of time with David Bowie, and I was talking about getting the band back together. He said, ‘Does it make you uncomfortable?’ I said ‘Yeah’, and he said, ‘Good – it should. You should be uncomfortable’… David was always making himself uncomfortable.”

On the track “How Do You Sleep” Murphy describes being abandoned by a lifelong friend – “Standing on the shore getting old / You left me here with the vape clowns” – the song might be interpreted as a revenge tune directed at Tim Goldsworthy, who co-founded DFA, and from whom Murphy is now estranged.

“tonite and call the cops are just wow wow wow holy hell this shit is miraculous.”

No doubt he was inspired by “tonite” lyrics – “Oh, I’m a reminder: a hobbled veteran of the disk-shop inquisition / Sent to parry the cocksure mem-stick filth with mine own late-era middle-aged ramblings.”

The 12-minute closer track “Black Screen,” appears to be about the time he spent working with his hero David Bowie on Bowie’s album “Blackstar,” which was released just days before the rock legend died last year. It’s a sort of eulogy offered to a man he deems – “between a friend and a father” – and someone who – “talked to me like I was inside.”